Have you ever thought about adding a forum to your site? It’s not as hard as you think. A forum is a good way to build a community where people can interact and learn from one another. Our own forum is still relatively new but if you have not had a chance to view it you should do so.
If your using our shared hosting just login to your cPanel and do the following…
- Click on Fantastico.
- Scroll down and click on phpBB.
- Click on New Installation.
- Enter in an admin username and password and click install.
Your done. You now have a forum installed and ready to go.
Next week we will discuss how to integrate phpBB with WordPress.
If you get stuck leave a note in the comments or catch me on twitter.
Robert Ballantyne
January 24, 2009 9:00 pm
I’ve administered several phpBB forums. I maintain an old phpBB2 site that I created as groupware for a number of colleagues who lived far apart. It worked well. The problem was that the captcha can be read by the spammer’s robots. Although the site is now inactive, I receive daily registration attempts. The spam is blocked by the “Textual Confirmation” hack, but I still receive the reports of the attempts.
I will be moving that domain to a new server sometime (real soon) and at that time I’ll abandon phpBB2.
I also have a small phpBB3 site. For some reason, that has never been spammed. I don’t understand what blocks the spammers… the captcha does not seem much more sophisticated – but I’m glad it is. I really like the philosophy and features of phpBB.
BTW, starting an effective forum, especially if it is meant to attract the public, requires lots of initial work. Not just the setup, but encouraging and supporting the folks. It helps to have a bunch of people who are willing to make it look active until it catches on.
Webkinz
January 25, 2009 9:19 am
Are there any plugins that integrate forums into wordpress blogs?
blogadmin
January 26, 2009 9:12 am
We will be discussing these next week :)